“Pride in a national identity should never be confused with a closed feeling or with the rejection of the knowledge of others,” defended Pedro Sánchez, in the speech with which this Monday he closed the event of the European Day of Languages celebrated at the headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, wielding the memory of Federico García Lorca and Rosalía de Castro.
After the approval of the reform of the Congress regulations, which will now allow the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician, in addition to Spanish, in the investiture debate that Alberto Núñez Feijóo will face starting tomorrow – despite the rejection of the Popular Party and the far-right Vox-, and promote the use of these co-official languages in European institutions, the acting president of the Government has claimed multilingualism as the best reflection of “today's Spain”, which he has defined as “an open country "Modern, tolerant." “A plural country, in its ideologies and in its cultures, and also diverse in its languages, plural in the streets and in Parliament,” he has defended.
Sánchez, after the PP protest this Sunday in Madrid, has thus drawn Spain as “a full democracy, with solid institutions, which translate into Government the popular will expressed by all Spaniards every time there are free and equal elections.” . At the gates of his own investiture debate, once that of the PP leader fails, as expected, the acting head of the Executive has defended "a democracy where the reasoned word deprives insults of meaning."
“It makes no sense to think that we only have one language, prohibiting, hiding and erasing all the others,” Sánchez highlighted. And he has highlighted that in Spain, “fortunately, co-official languages today enjoy an advanced level of protection and recognition.” This is mandated by the Spanish Constitution and the laws that emanate from it, as he has stressed. “Our linguistic plurality is a unique value that defines us and makes us who we are,” he said.
In the presence of the president of the Lower House, Francina Armengol, Sánchez celebrated that "listening in the Congress of Deputies to the languages with which our compatriots name the reality of Spain was essential." For two reasons, he explained: because these languages “are part of the great cultural legacy of our country and we must consequently take care of them,” but also because “protecting a language is also a political decision, just as it is to censor or curtail it.”
In a veiled allusion to the opposition of the PP and Vox to the use of co-official languages in Congress, Sánchez has warned that “there are those who are tempted to caricature this effort,” to guarantee their use. “And there are even those who invent battles and conflicts where there is only democratic normality,” he warned. But, "to those who reason this way I will say that, as in so many other conquests and advances, time will end up proving progress and coexistence right." “Instead of the transitory noise of the present, the hope of tomorrow,” he defended.
Sánchez has pointed out that “Spain already lived through a time in which co-official languages were prohibited”, in reference to the period of the Franco dictatorship. But today, he highlighted, "our democracy is strong and is prepared to respond in all languages, whatever the questions, and it is time to give them their space where the popular will of a citizenry that wants to be able to express itself in its co-official languages, which are those of their parents and grandparents, in which they dream, in which they think, in which they imagine and in which their citizens speak.” “They are languages that are everyone's heritage,” he concluded.
